Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web?

No, what the Linux community was impressed with initially was the fact that an African millionaire decided to produce a Debian Linux spin-off that would be available for 2nd and 3rd World countries.

Ubuntu, the distro, however, is not Canonical, the corporation. Shuttleworth is independently wealthy and annual revenues for their services still nets them around $30 million. No that is not Apple, but it is hardly bleeding out and struggling to keep the lights on.

FOSS and Linux are not the same as 'corporate capitalism' though they are hardly 'communistic' in opposition to it. But you obviously confuse the two numerous times in this post. Most complaints these days about Ubuntu and Canonical are that they do not know how to separate the two either.

For example, Ubuntu's insistence on using Unity and now adding by default (i.e., I must opt-out not opt-in) integrated Amazon search are two examples of this inappropriate fusing of two radically different philosophies where both become watered down. Freedom is removed from Ubuntu, and Canonical is still not the African Apple or Microsoft.

If they want to be financially more successful, they could learn a thing or two from the market segment leaders like IBM, Red Hat, etc. Red Hat and Fedora keep and maintain this separation. If Fedora wants to be bleeding edge and do something stupid like adding Gnome 3, then they can. If it is a screw-up, someone will fork it, maintain Gnome 2, etc. Red Hat's corporate Linux is very conservative and maintains stability for long-term business customers and thereby provides them a much more stable and growing revenue stream. After all, RHEL versions 4, 5 & 6 ship with Gnome 2.8, 2.16, & 2.28 respectively.

Shuttleworth made his millions in the 'dot-com' high as a venture capitalist. He is a 'personality' and not necessarily the best person to run a successful long-term corporate entity in the 'Linux' world.